Marrow Island (5 page)

The sun had burned through the clouds; it was getting warm—dew had started to form between my breasts and under my arms. I pulled my sweater off over my head and thought about taking it back to the car, or putting off the visit to the clerk’s office, going up to the cemetery first. A few late-season tourists milled about, looking relaxed. A couple walked by me and said, “Good morning,” as they passed. They wore small bemused smiles, their cheeks flushed; they weren’t holding hands, but they bumped into each other as they walked, arms brushing intentionally. They had clearly been having sex all night to the sounds of the sea.

I hated them a little bit, for having sex on my island, though I knew that was what people did on seaside vacations. When my mom was a teenager, she spent summers housekeeping at lodges and motels all over the islands. I thought of her stripping one dirty sheet after another. I might’ve done the same, if we had stayed.

There were two motels, a bed-and-breakfast, and half a dozen vacation rentals in Orwell. Most people didn’t stay on our island. Most people stayed in Friday Harbor or Rochelle, on San Juan Island. Or in the smaller, more expensive places on Lummi and Orcas. The ferries only made a couple stops a day in Orwell. There wasn’t much to do here, other than stroll and eat seafood, so it was sold more as a romantic getaway than a family destination.

When Matt found out about the cottage, he had asked why I hadn’t told him about it, why I hadn’t brought him out here. He wanted to go crabbing and eat mussels right out of the shell on the shore; he wanted to visit the Benedictine nuns on Shaw Island who raised heirloom cattle and sheep. This was just a destination to him, an experience. A place with no context. I was crazy, he told me, for having access to something like this and not taking advantage of it. He was right, that I was privileged in a way most of my peers weren’t. Owning property was getting harder and harder in cities like Seattle and San Francisco. The fact that my family had a “vacation home” made me slightly embarrassed.

I had tried to explain to him why I never came back, why I never talked about it. The death of a parent he understood, but the harrowing aftermath of the earthquake was lost on him. He was only a year older than I—he had been thirteen at the time of the quake and had only vague memories of the media coverage. He had moved to Seattle from Brooklyn in 2006. Aside from the tail end of a hurricane or two, he hadn’t experienced a natural disaster. He had never felt an earthquake; they were as mythical as Sasquatch to him.

The clack of unlocking doors broke my daze. I wasn’t the only one on the stairs waiting for City Hall to open. A tall man stood off to my right, on the top step. He nodded. I smiled back and stood, stretching. An older woman in a pantsuit swung the door open, remarked on the beauty of the day, and held the door for us. I took my time up the stairs so that the man would go through first, but when I reached the top, he had paused to wait for me.

“You were here first,” he said, and nodded toward the entrance.

“I’m not in a hurry,” I said.

He led the way, and I followed behind, looking him over. He was wearing official-looking work clothes: thick cotton button-up with a crewneck showing at the top, dark, sturdy slacks with a belt, and steel-toed boots. Like a uniform, but not a uniform. No patches or decals. Like it was his day off, but he still needed to look the part. Law enforcement? I wondered. Fish and Wildlife? He was clean-shaven, with trim brown hair, but he’d been wearing a hat of some sort that had flattened the sides and left squirrely waves on top. We both followed signs for the clerk’s desk, and the lady bustled along behind us, asked us to take a seat while she answered the ringing telephone.

We sat in two wooden armchairs with a table of magazines and a potted plant between us. He picked up a
Sunset,
looked at the cover, then glanced up and offered it to me. The cover story was “Ten Island Getaways.”

“No thanks.” I laughed.

“I guess we’ve made it,” he said, putting the magazine back.

“A clean getaway,” I said.

“Do you live here in Orwell?” he asked.

“Not really,” I said. I looked at the manila envelope in my hands. All I had to do was file the deed, then the cottage would be mine. “I grew up here. I’m just back to take care of some family business.”

He nodded.

“Do you live here?” I asked.

“No, ma’am,” he said.

“Ma’am?”
I repeated, and laughed. He was maybe three or four years older than I.

He blushed, chewed the inside of his cheek. I couldn’t tell if he was trying not to laugh or just embarrassed.

“I’m here for work. I’m not sure where I’ll be living at the moment.”

A sheriff’s deputy came through from a back office.

“Hey there, Carey, sorry to keep you waiting,” the deputy said. He came around and shook hands with the man next to me.

“Hey, Chris,” he said, “no problem.”

His last name was embroidered to his uniform:
Lelehalt
. I recognized him. Chris Lelehalt. His grandma May and my grandma Lucia were both Lummi and in a sewing circle together. Many of the old-timers were Catholic, so the sewing bees were always at St. Mary’s, in the basement meeting room with folding tables and chairs, plates of cookies, grandkids playing tag in the cemetery. Chris was a year younger, so I didn’t play with him much, but his mom worked at the refinery on Marrow, one of the few women at the plant. She made it home after the quake. Mom and I saw them at the church, where the Red Cross was distributing supplies. It may have been the last time I saw Chris—still lanky and pre-adolescent, black hair cut short and neat. Our mothers were standing around while an old lady gave us all typhoid shots. I remembered my mother asking her something—I didn’t actually hear what she asked; they were just outside the circle of mothers. Deb had shaken her head and hugged Mom hard. Chris was next in line, wincing as he watched the shot go into my arm.

“We’ve just got a few things to go over,” Chris was saying, tapping some papers on his hand. “The notary will be here later, the normal rigmarole, and you should be all set up by the end of the day. Let’s head on over.”

Carey, soon to be
all set up
by Deputy Chris Lelehalt and the notary public, turned back to me.

“Have a nice day,
ma’am,
” he said.

“You too,
sir,
” I said.

Chris Lelehalt watched this exchange, not recognizing me, and turned when Carey joined him, leading him through to the back of the clerk’s office.

“Well, it looks like you’re all mine.” The clerk stood and was staring at me from behind the desk. She was so short that her eyes were nearly level with mine in my chair against the wall.

I told her why I was there, and she handed me something else to fill out, took my deed, and looked at it.

“Bowen,” she said, “the cottage out there by the Swenson place?”

“Yeah.”

“Haven’t been Bowens out here for a long time.”

“No.”

“You won’t remember me,” she said after a long pause. “My son Aaron worked with your dad. Lost him the same day.”

I stopped filling out the form. She was right; I didn’t remember her. I hadn’t even noticed her name plate on the counter, hidden behind a box of tissues:
MARLA SHARPE.

“I’m sorry” was all I could say.

“So am I, dear.”

She was quiet while I filled out the rest of the form, then she took the lot and made copies.

“Are you moving back here?” she asked while we waited, printer humming.

“I don’t know,” I said. “It needs a lot of work.”

She nodded. “It’s an old house; survived a lot better than some. If you’re thinking of selling, talk to Jacob Swenson first; he wants to keep that side of the island from development.”

“I’ve never met him—does he live at Rookwood year-round?”

“Oh, yes. He’s around most of the year. He oversees things, since Julia passed.”

I nodded. “Is he an artist like Julia and Maura?”

She laughed.

“An art lover, maybe. Collects antiques. No, I think it’s just a man his age, unmarried, living alone in that big old house out there, people will talk. They call him eccentric. But he’s no more eccentric than Julia ever was. Keeps to himself, but makes nice with folks when he needs to. Gives out a scholarship every year at the Festival.”

“He doesn’t seem to be home. Do you know if he’s away now?”

“He goes back east around Christmas, usually, and to Seattle every now and then. Comes back with his little red car packed with knickknacks and furniture.”

“A red Saab?”

“Yep, at least thirty years old, that car—I don’t know how he keeps it running out here.”

“I think I saw his car—in the garage. Does he usually leave it here when he goes back east?”

“That’s odd.” Her brow furrowed. “He drives himself everywhere. I think he parks it at SeaTac when he flies.” She waved her hand. “You know, he’s probably just sleeping off a late night, dear,” she said quietly, and winked, then turned away to retrieve the copies.

My mother had always complained about the islanders’ propensity for gossip, but as a journalist I privately rejoiced every time I met a local busybody like Marla Sharpe.

“Try again this evening,” she said, handing me the papers. “I bet he’ll give you the tour of his collection.”

“Sure, thanks.”

I gathered up my copies and slid them into my bag.

I walked toward the cemetery. On the way I passed the Co-op and stopped in to buy a clutch of dahlias—
ISLAND-GROWN,
the sign proclaimed. There were dahlias bursting like anemones around fence posts and front porches all over the islands this time of year. I probably could have walked up to any front door and asked to pick a few. But I paid the six bucks and kept walking up the hill, past the church itself and through the wrought-iron gate and into the cemetery. The ground was soft under my feet, like the thick soft carpet inside the church.

I passed Aaron Sharpe’s headstone, untied the bundle of flowers, and put one in the scummy vase at the base. Near the back, just before a broad open hill sloped down, was Dad’s marker.
WILLIAM WHITMAN BOWEN
, his father’s name within his own. Grandma Lucia and Grandpa Whit were tucked together next to him. As a child I had pictured them sleeping side by side in a cozy bed, blankets folded under their arms. A grave was just an underground bedroom, where people went into permanent hibernation.

At my dad’s funeral, there had been nothing to imagine. There was no interment, just a headstone on soil, waiting. In case he washed up somewhere. In case some bone fragment gave up some DNA we could trace through mine to confirm. We had nothing to bury. Of all the survivors of the Marrow ArPac disaster, none could remember when or where they had last seen my father. One thought he saw him boarding a boat just before the first waves came; another thought he was helping others, inside, just before the explosion. A few men had burned to cinders when the fire controls failed; pipes that carried water to sprinklers were crushed under the weight of collapsed steel, and water glugged uselessly out into drainage ditches and then back into the sea.

Coast Guard boats and fire flights that may have come to help had either been incapacitated in the quake or dispatched to other emergencies before the radio calls reached them. ArPac was the oldest, smallest petroleum refinery in the area—there were two others—and fires were already underway at Tesoro in Anacortes. There were chemical spills all over the sound, from ships and barges washed against pilings or slammed ashore, from paper plants, from railways along the water. The coal terminal in Bellingham had just been completed, and the wave—though less powerful than it was farther south near Everett and Seattle—spread a cubic mile of coal over land and water throughout up and down the sound.

There were people in the water who needed saving, too.

Bodies had washed up for weeks after the quake, along with all the other flotsam. I had been forbidden to beachcomb—a daily routine in ordinary times—but Katie and I slipped away. Our mothers were sleepless and busy with post-disaster chores, easily manipulated into believing the other mother was on watch. We were twelve and shrugged off their worry like wool cardigans. We had walked through the woods between our houses to a rocky crescent of shoreline. I don’t know what we expected to find—I don’t remember if we went for any reason other than transgression—but there were more dead shorebirds than I had ever seen, cast among the jagged hulls of small boats, rope and fishing gear, fish and crabs trapped and suffocated or starved in the mesh. We had pulled our shirts over our noses to filter the air, thick with sea rot and animal rot, mixed with the eye-glazing fumes of the chemical dispersants they had eventually used on the oil slicks around Marrow. Everything had an oily gloss, a sheen like a puddle in a gas station parking lot.

A feeling had come over me, as we picked through furniture and disintegrating cereal boxes and a pair of eyeglasses. A man’s work boot, a hooded sweatshirt, items of clothing so filthy and sodden we couldn’t identify them, heaped over driftwood, branches. I remembered reaching out to touch them—wanting to uncover the logs, maybe? And realizing they weren’t logs. I had looked at Katie, and her face mirrored the unease that had settled in me. She had climbed up onto a giant downed tree and reached down for my hand. I took it and joined her, staring over the wrecked shore below us, the clouds of flies hovering over the heaps. We jumped down the other side into the grass and ran back into the woods. We never talked about it; but we both knew. We had been breaking a cardinal rule. And it was obvious he was already dead. What could we do to help him? We couldn’t tell anyone without getting in trouble ourselves, so we didn’t.

The body wasn’t my father, who never did wash up, at least not on Orwell or Marrow, convincing my mother that he had been trapped in the refinery by the fire. I laid the flowers across his headstone. There was a plot next to my father, for my mom. She was remarried, so I figured the plot would be mine, someday.